Network assisted interference cancellation and suppression (NAICS) has attracted a lot of attention in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) due to its capability to increase transmission rate and is adopted as an optional feature in Release 12 of the 3GPP. In the presence of an interference signal, joint maximum-likelihood (ML) detection can provide a significant performance gain. However, to perform joint detection, interference dynamic parameters such as channel, transmission mode (TM), number of cell-specific reference signal (CRS) ports (TM1-TM7), number of demodulation reference signal (DMRS) ports (TM8-TM10), precoding power (PA) and transmitted power (PB) (TM1-TM7), rank indicator (RI), pre-coding matrix indicator (PMI), and modulation order must be known.
A conventional receiver considers co-channel interference as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The NAICS was introduced to address the capacity and performance issues in LTE downlink channels, including the high complexity of conventional joint ML estimation of traffic to pilot ratio (TPR), rank, precoding, and modulation order. Due to the limited back-haul and control channel resources from an evolved node B (eNB) to a user equipment (UE), it is not be possible to provide a UE with information regarding all the interfering cell dynamic parameters. A portion of the dynamic parameters may be provided as side information to the UE so that other parameters are left for blind-detection by the UE.